Pink Slime Sites Posing as Local News Drew Millions in Facebook Ads, CMU Finds

What pink slime journalism is

Named after the meat by-product, pink slime journalism refers to news websites that publish digitally generated, low-quality content or partisan articles while presenting themselves as local news sources. According to the CMU team, these sites have emerged as reliable local news outlets have diminished. Unlike real local outlets, the public does not know who funds and influences them.

The researchers, based in CMU's Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), say the harm lies in how these sites exploit people's trust in local news to affect their beliefs. The sites typically have no real ties to the communities they claim to cover and publish a mix of digitally generated local and national news. The researchers also note that as AI-generated content improves, more articles appear to be written by real people even though they were manufactured by AI.

What the study found

The team collected 14,581 advertisement posts shared from 310 Facebook pages, linking to 383 unique domains, most of which had pink slime origins. Beyond spending trends, they looked at who was targeted and found that campaigns were tailored along demographic and state lines. The sites targeted more swing states and specific populations in crucial election years.

• Left-leaning sites targeted more women than men, with more impressions from people under 55.
• Right-leaning sites targeted more men and got more impressions from people older than 55.

Although the ad spending was on Facebook, the promoted sites also linked to other platforms such as X and Reddit. The operators also used local Facebook groups aimed at specific populations. Lynnette Ng, an S3D doctoral alumna who worked on the research, said sharing articles in community groups taps into existing social trust. "For these companies, Facebook groups are a great proxy for the local populace," she said.

The sites do not disappear after elections. According to the researchers, they keep operating and shift to lawsuits and legal fights along with local content, with the aim of keeping the Facebook accounts and pages active and fresh in people's minds.

The networks behind the sites

Pink slime sites are typically owned by a parent organization that runs a network of outlets using digitally generated content tweaked to appeal to each local community. The study analyzed three such parent organizations: Courier, Metric Media and American Independent Media. The researchers identified Metric Media as conservative-leaning, while Courier and American Independent have more liberal leanings.

Metric Media runs about a thousand of these sites, according to the researchers. One of them, the Scranton Reporter, covers areas of a contentious congressional race. Its Government section features numerous articles about the Republican incumbent's work on federal grants and roundtables, without any coverage of the race as a whole.

S3D Professor Kathleen M. Carley said the local framing gives the content extra weight. "These sites will have the local information, like sports scores, which you don't need a journalist to do. But these sites also have national stories, and they make them look like they were done locally because they put a picture of someone local into it," she said.

What it means for readers

Carley said the research is not meant to criticize generative AI for providing informative content such as business openings or upcoming events. The problem arises when biased or incomplete information arrives through channels people believe they can trust. "When it comes to things like political commentary or scientific commentary, the danger of these pink slime sites is you're letting one group, and you don't even know who they are, control the message," she said.

She also said that as AI-generated content improves and mimics real journalism, audiences could find it harder to discern the political influences behind these sites. The researchers expect advertising dollars and posting on Facebook to increase in upcoming elections.

The work builds on a larger research program by Christine Lepird, a former S3D Ph.D. student now at Johns Hopkins University, and Carley. That program examines how pink slime sites spread across social media and how computational methods can identify new outlets before they become widely established. The team argues that detecting these networks is increasingly important because automated content generation and AI-assisted publishing make it easier to create large numbers of seemingly local news sources at scale.